Mortgage News

Mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are suspending foreclosures for about 16,000 households during the holiday season.

Citigroup Inc faced a crisis of confidence on Wednesday as investors questioned the survival prospects of the U.S. banking giant, and its shares tumbled 23 percent to a 13-year low.

GMAC Financial Services has applied to become a bank holding company, which would allow General Motors' financing arm to be eligible for aid under the government's $700 billion bank rescue plan.

The federal government began the new budget year with a record deficit of $237.2 billion, reflecting the billions of dollars the government has started to pay out to rescue the financial system.

The Treasury Department said Thursday that the deficit for the first month in the new budget year was the highest monthly imbalance on record. It was far bigger than analysts expected, over four times larger than the October 2007 deficit of $56.8 billion, and more than half the total for all of last year.

Two government programs designed to help hundreds of thousands of delinquent borrowers avoid foreclosure are having negligible effects, a top Bush administration official acknowledged yesterday.

Construction of new homes plunged last month to the lowest level on records going back nearly 50 years as U.S. builders slashed production while Wall Street nosedived.

Auto executives appeared on Capitol Hill for a second day on Wednesday to argue their case for a $25 billion aid package as legislators in both houses and in both parties seemed to move closer to a deal.

THE housing market suffered a new blow after it emerged last night that house buyers will have to come up with at least 20pc of the value of properties they plan to buy.

Home prices fell in four out of every five U.S. cities in the third quarter, a record spurred by distressed foreclosure sales across the country.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke waged a stout defense on Capitol Hill Tuesday of their management of a $700 billion financial bailout just one week after the administration abandoned the original strategy behind the rescue.

Focusing the program on infusing billions into banks _ and possibly other types of companies _ to pump up their capital and bolster lending to customers was deemed a faster and more effective approach to stabilizing the financial system than buying rotten assets from financial institutions, the centerpiece of the original plan, Paulson said.

Citigroup, widely seen as the sickest Wall Street bank, will make some of the most severe cuts in the history of U.S. business _ 53,000 jobs _ as it tries to slash costs and get back to basics before it's too ...

Superintendent Lloyd P. LaFountain, III announced on Monday that recently completed analysis of 2008 second quarter data by the Bureau of Financial Institutions shows a continuing slow increase in home ...

The selling on Wall Street continued Monday as investors digested more signs of economic weakness, including a huge round of layoffs in the financial sector.

After a turbulent week that sent the Dow Jones industrials down nearly 340 points, investors found little solace in the latest news.

In a sign that banks are still struggling in the wake of massive losses tied to bad mortgage debt, Citigroup Inc. is cutting another 53,000 jobs in the coming quarters. The company said that in addition to job cuts, it plans to lower expenses by about 20 percent, and that is has reduced its assets by more than 20 percent since the first quarter of the year.

At the center of today's economic and credit crisis is the rising tide of home foreclosures, which government agencies and some large banks are trying to address by allowing borrowers to modify their mortgages.

LAWMAKERS are complaining that the Bush administration is ignoring the will of Congress and slighting homeowners on the verge of foreclosure in its latest approach to spending $700 billion in economic rescue ...

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Steve Preston recently announced what he said was a "mammoth leap forward for the consumer." So what does this entail? It's an overhaul of the good-faith estimate used ...

The leaders of the Group of 20 nations, including the world's richest countries and such major developing economies as China, Brazil, India and Russia, issued a joint statement and detailed action plan after their meeting Saturday pledging to take a variety of steps to combat the current economic crisis and make sure it doesn't happen again.

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Here are the major points:

ROOT CAUSES OF CRISIS

The leaders blamed the worst financial crisis to strike since the 1930s on a failure of investors to sufficiently understand the risks they were taking. Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that the global economy had been doing so well for so long that that investors were lulled into a false sense of security. The joint statement does not specifically mention what many view as the epicenter of the crisis, an explosion in the United States in subprime mortgages, loans made to people with weak credit histories. The resulting collapse in home prices caused record mortgage defaults and resulted in billions of dollars of losses to financial institutions in the United States and around the world.

The deep troubles of the U.S. economy are pushing a growing number of already struggling Americans into bankruptcy, often with far more debt than those who filed in previous downturns.

What will it take to get consumers off the sidelines to buy more houses and help stimulate the economy? How about a mortgage at 2.99 percent fixed rate for 30 years for anyone who purchases a home before next ...

Investors have been fixed on Humpty Dumpty. Or at least it appeared that way last week, after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson left the impression that perhaps all the kings' men weren't sure how they were ...